Where “R” we going?

The current status of the R language, and lessons from an NSF POSE grant for the data.table package.

Kelly Bodwin, California Polytechnic State University

Context

  • 🔅 data.table is an extremely popular R package for dataset manipulation and summarizing

  • 🔅 NSF Grant 1005559 (Pathways to Open-Source Ecosystems)

  • “Supports the facilitation, creation and growth of open-source ecosystems for the creation of new technology solutions.”

  • 🔅 My role: community building, documentation and education, governance and sustainability

Relevance

R is dying? Not even close…

(Ranked #14 in 2025; near-tie with e.g. Perl, SQL, PHP, Matlab)

Where is R cutting edge?

  • 🔅 Packages for specific statistical models

  • 🔅 Readable and beginner-friendly data wrangling with the tidyverse

  • 🔅 Speedy in-memory data manipulation with data.table

  • 🔅 Communities of domain-specific packages

Resources

How the sausage gets made

What about packages?

  • 🔅 The tidyverse and tidymodels sets are maintained by paid developers at Posit, PBC.

  • 🔅 Sometimes, funding can come from:

    • temporary public or private grants
    • companies that allow employee “creative time”
    • companies that release their internal work openly

  • … but almost all of what you use is made by community members with no compensation.

Reach

The #rstats community

  • 🔅 Access to social connections with other users

  •   → ⛅ bsky.app/profile/rdatatable.bsky.social

  •   → 🦣 fosstodon.org/@r_data_table

  •   → linkedin.com/company/data-table-community/

  • 🔅 Conferences and meetups (including online) are thriving

  •   → Travel grant for data.table

  •   → Hex stickers - find me!

Education and accessibility

What “R” you doing to support open-source?

How to help

  • 🔅 Open-source work needs professional recognition

  •   → Did you cite EVERY package you used in your most recent paper?

  •   → Do you vote for awards/tenure/promotions for people who develop open-source code?

How to help

Find me and the data.table project!

⛅ bsky.app/profile/kellybodwin.com

🦣 fosstodon.org/@kellybodwin

🔗 https://www.linkedin.com/in/kelly-bodwin-9009061a/

“Keep R Weird” Keynote

⛅ bsky.app/profile/rdatatable.bsky.social

🦣 fosstodon.org/@r_data_table

🔗 linkedin.com/company/data-table-community/

linktr.ee/rdatatable

Blog: The Raft